After the breach: Settlement expected for 50M Home Depot customers

Free credit card monitoring and cash payments are on the table for those affected by a breach of Home Depot.

A settlement is brewing between The Home Depot and the 50 million customers whose personally identifiable information (PII) was compromised in a massive hack in 2014, according to a Fox 5 video.

Provided a judge signs off on it, Home Depot customers who used a credit or debit card between April 1 and Sept. 18, 2014 at a self-checkout terminal or received notification that their email address was compromised are party to the class action.

Free credit card monitoring and cash payments are on the table for those affected by the breach.

The retailer was hit with several suits in the wake of the attack claiming the chain did not adequately secure its payment card system or notify customers in a timely manner.

Home Depot denied the allegations, but agreed to settle the data breach class action lawsuit to avoid the cost and uncertainty of trial.

Claims must be submitted by Oct. 29, 2016.

"The fundamentals of how we deal with data security need to be reinvented to ensure we can actually protect peoples' digital lives,"Ajay Arora, CEO and co-founder of Vera, told SCMagazine.com in an emailed statement. "At the end of the day, all cybersecurity – whether it's at the network, device, application, platform or database level – ultimately exists to protect companies' and peoples' information and data. So why don't we attach that security directly to that information and data and have it follow that data wherever it goes."

It's not that hard to imagine, Arora added, and it's not that hard to make happen. "We as an industry just need to make it easy for businesses like Home Depot and others to ingest it into their environments so they can start really protecting their customers' and employees' critical information from being stolen and potentially ruining their lives."

Techscape is SC Media’s content marketing platform. Industry experts share their views in the following categories

Partner Content is sponsored content brought to you by a vendor

SC Media arms cybersecurity professionals with the in-depth, unbiased business and technical information they need to tackle the countless security challenges they face and establish risk management and compliance postures that underpin overall business strategies.